Swiss architectural historian, author of Space, Time and Architecture and a formative influence on McLuhan in the 1940s — "the Skornia of the '40s," as Bob puts it. Through Giedion, McLuhan knew the MIT cybernetics circle; from Giedion he took the "orchestra" ideal of disciplines sounding a common truth, which he pitched (unsuccessfully) to the University of Chicago in 1946. Cameron traces how McLuhan was later "knocked away" from that ideal on the way to "the medium is the message."
Across the dialogues
The conduit to MIT cybernetics in the 1940s — "the Skornia of the '40s"
Giedion was McLuhan's window onto the MIT cybernetics work in the 1940s — down to the recognition that the computer, and digitality, were its key.
"His friend Giedion had been teaching at MIT at the end of the 1940s, and McLuhan knew about that. And through Giedion, he knew about Karl Deutsch, and he knew about all of the work on cybernetics that was being done at MIT. And he knew that the key to this work in cybernetics was the computer."
Giedion played for the 1940s the role Skornia played later — the steady interlocutor in McLuhan's thinking.
"Giedion is in his thoughts through the '40s — so Giedion is like the Skornia of the '40s."
Cameron believes McLuhan was tied into the Macy Conferences (via Giedion) before Theall arrived in 1950.
"I think that McLuhan was already hooked into the Macy Conferences before Don showed up at the University of Toronto."
Giedion's "orchestra" of disciplines — the ideal McLuhan pitched to Chicago, then was knocked away from on the road to "the medium is the message"
Giedion's ideal: scholars from different faculties sounding, like an orchestra, a common truth they already share but cannot hear.
"And what Giedion said was that if we're to regain a notion of truth, to guide our civilization again as it once did, what we need is for people from different faculties to speak together and to find the common truth that they already have, but they don't know that they have."
McLuhan carried Giedion's orchestra ideal into a 1946 pitch for an independent college at Chicago — rejected as too ambitious.
"He wanted millions and millions of dollars, and they just waved him away. He was asking too much."
The culture-and-technology seminar of 1953–55 knocked McLuhan off Giedion's ideal — a turn that, a couple of years later, surfaced as "the medium is the message."
"He got knocked away from the ideal that he had from Giedion. He found out that it may be easy to say that we're going to get these people together and they're going to agree on truth, but it doesn't happen. They just end up yelling at each other."
Returns as the source of McLuhan's peace formula — the "Faculty of Interrelations" behind the line about defusing the human bomb by dialogue
The line McLuhan drew from Giedion's early-1940s essay "[the] Faculty of Interrelations" — written "before the bombing of Hiroshima" — is his whole peace program in one phrase: dialogue as the way to defuse the human bomb.
"to diffuse this gigantic human bomb by starting a dialogue."
The orchestra ideal traced to its book — Space, Time and Architecture (1943) named the origin of McLuhan's lifelong symphony metaphor — and Giedion's 1950 MIT lectureship advanced as evidence against the Theall-introduced-cybernetics story
Cameron dates McLuhan's lifelong "symphony" metaphor to his 1943 reading of Giedion's Space, Time and Architecture — the recurring call to bring different disciplines "into tune," running "from at least 1943 until the end."
"he was very involved with the symphony metaphor."
Cameron cites Giedion's 1950 MIT lectureship and the 1948 essay he sent McLuhan — the off-print preserved in the Giedion papers in Zurich — as grounds to "rethink the Theall introduction of cybernetics to McLuhan."
"and the off-print is still to be found in the Giedion papers in Zurich."
Given an ancestry of his own — no longer the origin of McLuhan's tactility but its penultimate carrier, a pupil of Wölfflin standing in a line that runs back through Hildebrand, so the influence McLuhan received arrives already two generations old
Giedion is relocated from source to conduit — the tactile reading of visual form reached him already formed, which makes McLuhan a third-generation inheritor rather than a direct one.
"And Wölfflin was the professor, the mentor of Giedion."
Cameron's ranking survives the new genealogy — the added ancestry does not displace Giedion from the centre, it explains what he had to give.
"I think for McLuhan, the central influence is Giedion. And then Giedion goes back to these other figures."
The influence ran as instruction, not atmosphere — a specific assignment that sends McLuhan back to his French and into the Symbolists in the later 1940s.
"So there are letters between McLuhan and Giedion at that time, and it's Giedion who tells him that if he wants to come clear about... the stuff that he's thinking about, he has to get into French poetry."
The division of labour Cameron draws between McLuhan's two 1943 encounters — Lewis supplies the problem, Giedion the form an answer could take.
"And Giedion helps McLuhan see how there might be a solution there."
Connections
Through Giedion, McLuhan knew the MIT cybernetics circle in the 1940s; Giedion's orchestra-of-disciplines ideal shaped his 1946 Chicago college pitch.
McLuhan met Lewis (read 1936) before Giedion (~1943); Cameron lists both as formative influences absorbed by reading rather than in person.
Giedion was close to Joyce in his last years; Cameron reads Space, Time and Architecture as Finnegans Wake in architectural form.
Cameron names Wölfflin as Giedion's professor and mentor, the link that puts Giedion inside a longer tactility lineage rather than at its head.
Giedion's translator and editor from the late 1940s — the medium through which his rough English reached print.